Towards Better Governance of Urban Data: Concrete Examples of Success


Blogpost by Naysan Saran: “Since the Sumerians of the fourth millennium BCE, governments have kept records. These records have, of course, evolved from a few hundred cuneiform symbols engraved on clay tablets to terabytes of data hosted on cloud servers. However, their primary goal remains the same: to improve land management.

That being said, the six thousand years of civilization separating us from the Sumerians has seen the birth of democracy, and with that birth, a second goal has been grafted onto the first: cities must now earn the trust of their citizens with respect to how they manage those citizens’ data. This goal cannot be achieved without good data governance, which defines strategies for the efficient and transparent use and distribution of information.

To learn more about the state of the art in municipal data management, both internally and externally, we went to meet with two experts who agreed to share their experiences and best practices: François Robitaille, business architect for the city of Laval; and Adrienne Schmoeker, former Deputy Chief Analytics Officer for the City of New York, and Director at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics where she managed the Open Data Program for three years….(More)”